


No Time Like the Present

by Foxberry



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Retail, Awkward Flirting, Christmas Eve, Christmas Fluff, First Impressions, First Meetings, Fluff, M/M, gift wrapping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 16:36:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8998561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Foxberry/pseuds/Foxberry
Summary: Earning a little extra cash for the holidays by wrapping gifts seemed like a walk in the park for Marco Bodt, but by the end of Christmas Eve he can't wait for it all to be over. As his shift ends, a handsome stranger turns up last minute wanting all of his presents wrapped. His timing couldn't have been more frustrating.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [commodorecliche](https://archiveofourown.org/users/commodorecliche/gifts).



> Written for the lovely Lindsey <3
> 
> Prompt: "Modern AU, Marco is earning some extra cash at the mall by working the Christmas present wrapping table. Jean comes in the day before Christmas eve with a bag of presents that he forgot to wrap. Marco wants to mad, but he kinda likes this guy."
> 
> I knew I had to write this as soon as I got it. I'm way too familiar with that kind of situation ;) I hope you like how this turned out!

The sounds of screaming children and obnoxious customers have already gotten Marco on the edge of frustrated, but if he has to hear another rendition of “A Wonderful Christmastime” he might just wrap his head up in paper and ribbons until he can’t hear a thing. It plays across the mall speakers with a clarity that he resents, watching the last minute late night shoppers hurry about their business. Only fifteen minutes left of Christmas Eve gift wrapping duty and he can go home.

“Please let it end,” Marco sighs, fiddling with yet another bow for yet another impatient customer. He ignores the papercuts on his fingers and the slight stickiness on his hands from roll after roll of tape, finishing the present with a satisfied little smile. It’s not much, but with every present he wraps he feels a warm flush of accomplishment, knowing that someone out there is going to enjoy their Christmas.

He turns to the customer with the newly wrapped gift in his hand. “Have a Merry Christmas!” He smiles genuinely at least, but the customer takes his hard work and shoves it into her bag without so much as a thank you. She walks off with a stern nod and leaves Marco to pull a face. He’ll have a long night ahead of him for sure.

He’d thought that making some extra cash in the holiday season would be easy. He loves wrapping presents, after all. He loves Christmas. He loves making people happy at Christmas. This job, however, is starting to crack him into tiny little pieces and sweep up all those pieces into the trash.

A voice interrupts his silent musings on whether or not he should pass the time making paper snowmen with a blunt “Excuse me.” It’s not exactly polite and it’s not exactly rude, but Marco is about ready to spin around at the guy demanding his attention and tell him off for how his tone scrapes against the inside of his mind.

“Yes?” Marco asks, exasperated, turning around to his customer with a somewhat pleasant grin. He expects he appears as grumpy as he feels when the man before him shrugs his shoulders self-consciously.

Dressed in an ugly sweater covered in questionable-looking snowflakes, the man before Marco might have been attractive if his hazel eyes weren’t beneath furrowed brows and his lips weren’t pursed into a frown. The line of his jaw seems harsher as he grits his teeth with a kind of impatience Marco has come to expect and loathe with his holiday job. For all the unpleasantness drawn over his face, Marco’s new customer seems to have had enough time to have work done to his hair. A careful undercut reveals a darker brown beneath the obviously dyed blond, well-coiffed mess of hair above. 

“Think you can wrap all of these for me?” the man asks, tipping out a shopping bag with at least seven gifts at Marco’s count. Each one is more awkwardly shaped than the last. It looks like a collection of last minute gifts if Marco has ever seen one. There’s a mixture of body creams and lipglosses, a handful of dvds, a soccer ball, and a collection of strange-looking plush toys.

Marco holds his tongue, biting the tip to suppress the frustration at how long each of these gifts is going to take to wrap, and wrap  _ neatly _ . “Of course. That won’t be too much of a problem.” The lie tastes bitter on the end of his tongue. Burnt coffee might have tasted better. “It’ll be $2 per gift.” Marco gestures over the array before him with a tight smile.

The man hums, pressing his lips together like he needs to warm them up before operating them, and nods. “Yeah, that’s fine. Got to get them all wrapped anyway. You’re doing me a real favour…” He leans in to read the name tag on Marco’s apron and reads out his name. “... Marco.” He grins and glances away with a nervous huff of a laugh.

Marco has nothing to say. The amount of times he’s had people try to get all friendly with him because they want something out of him has left him feeling more bitter as Christmas approaches. This stranger likely meant nothing by it, but Marco feels the same sick tension in his neck that someone he doesn’t know takes the display of his name as a justification to use it so casually.

“I’m Jean, by the way,” the man adds with another laugh. He shuffles side to side, his fingers playing with the hem of his sweater. “Just getting the last of the shopping done. You know how it is.” He leans on the table with a kind of carefree ease that sets Marco on edge.

“Not really.” Marco grabs one of the first gifts, a soccer ball, and starts wrapping it, hoping to get what he hopes is the most difficult one out of the way first. “I got mine done a month ago.” He doesn’t look up as he covers the ball in paper and gets to work, one fold after another in the semblance of something neat.

Jean lets out a surprised sound, similar to a scoff if Marco heard correctly. “A month ago?” “Seriously?” He folds his arms and tilts forward, shifting his weight onto the table and making it creak.

“Yeah, I plan ahead,” Marco responds with a tone that barely hides his disbelief that anyone would be so careless as to leave it to the last minute. He finishes up the soccer ball with a neat bow and moves quickly to the DVDs. “I don’t understand the whole last minute thing. I’ve got too many people to buy for, too much to cook. Everything’s got to be planned out.”

“Ah…” Jean sighs. He sounds genuinely interested instead of put off by how blunt every word comes out of Marco’s mouth. His tone changes to something wistful, even singsong, somehow in tune with the Christmas carols playing in the background. “Must be nice.”

Marco’s not entirely sure what Jean means, but he’s too focussed to pry into it more than a single hum. “Hmmm?” He can just make out Jean nodding when he turns to grab another roll of tape. The paper in his hands folds swiftly, relenting to the harsh movements of his fingers.

Jean shrugs and moves his weight to another foot, staring up at the ceiling. “You know, having traditions and things.” The bright glow of the Christmas lights of the mall decorations reflects in his eyes. The colour in them seems to twinkle when Marco looks back curiously, hands freezing.   
  
“What do you mean?” he asks as he starts tying a bow around one of the wrapped DVDs. His hands keep working even as he looks up, hours of practise leading him while his eyes look elsewhere. Jean appears to be softer the more that Marco finds himself staring at him. 

Unable to meet Marco’s eyes, Jean stares over his gifts, tilting his head with a fond gaze. “Uh, well, things you do for Christmas every year.” He gestures in circles, making shapes that only he can understand. Marco’s too lost for words, and not even remotely prepared to decipher this stranger’s mannerisms. “You sound like you know what you’re doing if you’ve got it all done beforehand.”

Blinking hard, Marco places all the wrapped gifts aside and grabs for the next lot. “And you don’t?” In the pit of his stomach he can feel a hint of curiosity, wanting to know more and not yet understanding what it is he wants to know.

“Christmas isn’t really my time of year.” Jean’s eyes look up sheepishly, honesty shining through the way the warm yellow glow softens the brown in his eyes. He apologises with a hunch of his shoulders and dips his hands into his pants pockets.

Folding the next lot of wrapping paper over, Marco resists the urge to pull a face at how strange that sentence is to hear. There must be a reason for it, something that makes it ‘not his time’. Getting last minute gifts probably has something to do with it. “Stressful?” he asks over his shoulder.

“Lonely,” Jean corrects, finding something of interest in his shoes. He keeps shuffling, whether or not Marco glances back to watch him in between bowing and taping. Jean starts when his eyes look up again and he finds Marco staring at him, a hint of colour dawning on his face. “Sorry, it’s the last thing people want to hear about on Christmas Eve, I know. Sounds like you’ll have a great day tomorrow.”

Marco finishes the present he was working on and pushes it aside. As he grabs the next, his eyebrows furrow, and he asks, “Why would you be lonely if you have all of this?” He taps along the last few presents left to wrap. So many gifts can only mean he has people to share them with, to give them to. The sheer number looks like the amount Marco would buy for his own family.

“Ah, well, it’s just my mom and me,” Jean explains, walking around the gift wrapping table. He grabs the last few presents and brings them around to Marco’s side. There’s a hint of something somber in his tone, almost reminiscent. “We get together, exchange presents, eat Christmas dinner, and watch old movies. That’s our thing.”

The closer Jean gets, the more Marco feels watched. His shoulders shrug up defensively and then relax back into a straighter posture. “That sounds nice.” Nervously, he glances up at all the shoppers walking by. It’s only the two of them for several metres. People are already starting to head home for Christmas.

“Yeah, it is. Don’t get me wrong, I love it, but… I don’t get to do much… gifting… I guess. Mom always knows what she wants.” The words rush out of Jean’s mouth like an excuse, trying to explain himself. He rubs at the snowflakes on his sleeve.

A confused sound makes its way out of Marco’s mouth before he realises and stops mid-cutting of more wrapping paper. There’s only a tiny bit left to go and he can feel a sense of disappointment rising in his chest that he’s almost done. Looking over it all, he finally asks, “Who’s this all for, then?”

Jean lets out a sigh. His face turns a soft shade of pink around his cheeks. If the mall wasn’t so warm, Marco might have thought he looked like he’d just walked in from the cold. “I… it’s… there’s a charity gift tree for disadvantaged kids. It looked empty under the tree so I…” He scratches at his sleeve and then his neck.

“Oh” falls from Marco’s lips before he can think of how surprised he sounds. He tries his best to hide it from his face, but he’s already staring Jean in the eye, noticing how different the colour is from this angle, how his smile is a tad bit crooked, how he might happen to like it that way.

“I couldn’t stand the idea of some of them not getting something for Christmas, so… this...” Jean smiles and nods at the pile of intricately wrapped presents Marco has gathered to the side. He worries at his lip with his teeth before he continues, “You’re really doing me a huge favour, but I need to stop talking before I embarrass myself further.”

“Embarrass yourself? Are you kidding?!” he laughs breathily, blinking through the muddle of thoughts going through his mind. The guy’s lonely, so he’s buying other kids presents. Kids he doesn’t even know. Maybe Marco was too quick to judge.

Jean rolls his eyes and turns his head, not able to look back, finding interest in a handful of shoppers making their way out. “It is, a little.” The guy can’t seem to keep still. He keeps shuffling, shrugging, playing with his probably hand-knitted sweater from his Mom, and sneaking glances up at Marco’s face from all the places his gaze falls. “Come on, what kind of guy goes shopping to buy a whole bunch of kids presents ‘cause he gets lonely at Christmas?”

“A sweet one,” Marco answers immediately, feeling a flush of warmth up his face at his sudden outburst. He finishes the last present in his hands with a flurry of fingers and lets out a quick sigh, shaky and nervous.

Jean's eyes are brighter when he opens them up wide. His words trip over his tongue. “I… I’m not… anyway, you sound like you’re going to really enjoy tomorrow.”

“Yeah…” Marco wonders briefly if he can sense a sadness behind the smile Jean gives him. He gently takes the shopping bag from Jean's hand, brushing lightly against his skin. “Look, I’m sorry I was…”

“It’s fine. You’re fine. I mean--” Jean clears his throat and watches Marco load present after present back into the bag. He stares intently at Marco's hands, playing with his own. “It’s okay.”

Marco bites his lip. Maybe it's worth taking a chance. He can't shake the idea that this has all played out too perfectly. “I, uh, I finish after I tidy up.” A cute, ridiculous, sweet guy is standing across from him, slinging a bag of gifts for children over his shoulder. “What would you say to a coffee afterwards? My treat? You can tell me more about how lonely you are.”

Marco waits with bated breath, watching the way Jean's eyes seem to glow again, the way his lip twitches between a silent gasp and a smile.

Jean answers him with a question, smirk growing on his face, “You sure this won’t interfere with your plans?” Confidence fills him up from his shoes to his shoulders and for the first time he stops moving in place.

Marco smiles and looks down. This isn't what he had planned for Christmas Eve, but he can't let a sweet guy like this feel lonely. “I think I’ve got time to make some more.” When he looks up again and finds his gaze met with those warm hazel eyes, he knows Christmas is going to be good this year.

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know what you think! All comments and kudos are very much appreciated
> 
> You can find me on [Tumblr (@foxberryblue)](https://foxberryblue.tumblr.com/) and Twitter ([@foxberryblue](http://twitter.com/foxberryblue) or [@particlebarrier](http://twitter.com/particlebarrier)) or on my writing only blog [Foxberry Writes](http://foxberrywrites.tumblr.com/).


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